Oblivion Holes Explained

February 14th, 2013

Let’s talk about oblivion holes. This blog won’t contain any Goblins spoilers, but some of the o-hole facts here will be repeated by characters in future dialogue. I’ll let you decide if you want to keep reading.

Oblivion holes aren’t ‘true oblivion’. As stated on previous comic pages, true oblivion can’t exist if anyone is aware of it. Of course, awareness isn’t the only thing that can dispel oblivion, but it’s effective. Oblivion is the complete lack of existence geographically, conceptually and even chronologically (which is the greatest argument I’ve come across for ‘existence’ after death, but that’s another discussion). Oblivion can’t have boundaries. if it has a boundary, it’s contained. If it’s contained, it exists. If it exists in some fashion, it’s not a complete void. So the oblivion holes that are scattered throughout the Maze of Many can’t truly be oblivion. They’re sort of… oblivion light. Think about this…

Minmax threw his pants into the o-hole. This means the pants never existed, so he’d be in his underwear, right? Wrong. Those pants were bought in Brassmoon City. If they truly never existed, then Forgath (who was forcing Minmax to buy pants) would have still walked into the shop and just grabbed a different pair of pants. Just because that one pair of pants never existed, doesn’t mean that all pants in Brassmoon disappear. So if those pants never existed, another pair of pants should have appeared on Minmax as soon as he threw his pants into the o-hole. So why was Minmax pantsless?

Since the o-holes aren’t true oblivion (being contained in neat, little holes and gawked at by conscious beings, etc.), they don’t truly erase anything from existence. What they actually do, is scrub whatever they swallow off the surface of existence. It’s similar to that time you spilled a drink on your carpet and had to clean it up. You scrubbed and scrubbed until it all disappeared. Once that wet spot dried, the mess was gone, as though the spill never happened! But if someone were to pull up that carpet and closely examine the parts deeper down, they’d find remnants of spilled Yo-Ho or Pepsi or whatever the hell you were drinking.

Minmax’s pants were erased from the surface of existence, but all of those deeper ’cause and effect’ equations were left alone. So if you were to throw your own Mother into an o-hole (you’d be a cold-hearted monster), you’d still exist, you’d just never have had a Mother. Still confused? Here’s another example…

2 + 2 = 4 We can all agree on that, right? Now if you threw the second 2 in that equation into ‘true’ oblivion, you’d get this…

2 + _ = 2 The second 2 never existed and so the sum is correctly changed. But if you were to throw that second 2 into an o-hole, you’d get this…

2 + _ = 4 See? That 2 is merely scrubbed from the surface of existence and everything else is left alone, even though it doesn’t add up. Just like Minmax’s pants.

If the o-holes were true oblivion, then the psionic Minmax, who’s only goal is to completely erase himself from existence, would just jump into one instead of continuing to work on erasing the entire Maze of Many.

So there you have it. It’s just a fictional set of varying degrees of non-existence.